Ask your political candidates about Free Software

Challenging local, regional, and national politicians on their position on Free
Software is a very important ongoing activity. Particularly in the run-up to
elections, engaging candidates and parties in software related questions can have a big impact.

How to ask your candidates

When to ask

Any time is a good time to ask your candidates about Free Software, but the run up to elections provides a particularly good opportunity as more attention is paid to the policies, intentions and promises of politicians and their parties. FSFE maintains a wiki calendar of European elections which can be used to determine the best time to initiate your own 'ask your candidates' campaign. The calendar relies on community contributed data, so please update and improve it if you can.

How to contact political candidates

Identify candidates working in an area where an election is taking place, and ideally who have knowledge or experience relating to Free Software and/or Open Standards. Such a person is more likely understand and respond to your question.

Send the candidate your questions by email, post, or both.

Publish your message (eg. on blogs.fsfe.org) in order to increase the incentive for the candidate to reply.

Let us know that you've sent it so that we can raise awareness of your actions and help to follow them up.

How to contact political parties

Create a survey, and send a printed copy to the party's postal address..

For each response that you receive read through the answers to your questions and summarise them on the dedicated survey answers wiki page.

How to increase the impact of your actions

Inform us of your plan to contribute to the campaign so that we can notify you of previous attempts and provide assistance.

Blog and microblog regularly about your activities in order to give others the opportunity to follow what you're doing. Some ideas for what to blog about include what prompted you to begin contacting candidates in the first place, your experiences composing and sending the questions or survey, any interesting enquiries you receive as a result of sending them, and what responses you expect to receive.

Once you've gathered responses from enough candidates or parties we will create a page on fsfe.org summarising them, possibly with a coinciding press release (example: German Federal election 2009).

From May 22 to 25 in 2014 European citizens will vote for candidates standing for the European Parliament. This is an ideal time to engage with politicians with why Free Software matters. Help us to get the candidates across Europe to declare their support for Free Software.

Today, the Free Software Foundation Europe publishes its
Free Software related election questions for this fall's elections
to the German parliament, which will take place on
September 22.
All political parties have responded to the questions, which cover
issues like users' control over their electronic devices, the
release of publicly funded computer programs as Free Software, and
software patents.